A painted metallic pipe, such as of aluminum, is conventionally used as a wire harness pipe for protecting a wire harness from stone chips and rainwater.
The wire harness pipe is bent into various shapes when attached to an automobile. When the painted wire harness pipe is bent, its paint film peels off or cracks. In addition, there was a problem of a high manufacturing cost due to a need of paint facilities and waste disposal/liquid waste treatment facilities to carry out a painting process.
Thus, a method of coating a metallic pipe with a heat shrink tube was examined as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2013-42648.